Treasongate: The Final Solution?

by eriposte

Picking up on Steve's post below regarding the Washington Post piece by Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus mentioning Fitzgerald's possible focus on Vice President Dick Cheney, may I point out that the most important part of the piece is near the end (emphasis mine):

Senior administration officials said there was a document circulated at the State Department -- before Libby talked to Miller -- that mentioned Plame. It was drafted in June as an administrative letter and addressed to then-Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who was acting secretary at the time since Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard L. Armitage were out of the country.

As a former State Department official involved in the process recalled it, Grossman wanted the letter as background for a meeting at the White House, where the discussion was focused on then growing criticism of Bush's inclusion in his January State of the Union speech of the allegation that Hussein had been seeking uranium from Niger.

The letter to Grossman discussed the reasons the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) did not believe the intelligence, which originated from foreign sources, was accurate. It had a paragraph near the beginning, marked "(S)," meaning it was classified secret, describing a meeting at the CIA in February 2002, attended by another INR analyst, where Plame introduced her husband as the person who was to go to Niger.

The article concludes with a note that Grossman has refused to answer questions about the letter, and it is not clear whether he talked about it at the White House meeting, but it doesn't matter -- Colin Powell or one of his loyalists has just shown how the murder weapon got in the hands of the suspected killers, and we already know the crime took place a few weeks later, when Scooter Libby told Judith Miller, "Gosh, Judy, I've heard Wilson's wife might have had something to do with his trip..."

The point is that we've long been wondering just how the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) may have gotten to know about Valerie Plame Wilson. Walter Pincus just told us the answer. (As he usually does).

P.S. Also stop by and read Swopa's highly interesting theory about who the two leakers were (from the famous 1x2x6 incident). Just so you know, he's not talking about Karl Rove and Lewis Libby.